Truth and Beauty: A Novel

By N. L. Rogan

Axel Gold was jinxed. Germans bombed him, the British starved him and his father abandoned him. As a man, his true love cuckolds him and he seems doomed to spend his life seeking truth and beauty on a planet run by deceit and corruption. Only in midlife does a long-suppressed memory free him to take the world as he finds it, and to profit by it.

Axel and George were childhood buddies. One becomes a journalist, the other survives Vietnam to become a filmmaker. It takes an Argentine beauty named Molly to set the friendship asunder.

Lush, lusty and politically incorrect—an irreverent, rollicking tale of the resilience of the human spirit and triumph of the underdog.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780228861829

N. L. Rogan

The author dropped out of school and left home at 16 to become a jack-of-all-trades. In turn, he became debt collector, hotel desk clerk, deckhand on North Atlantic freighters, longline commercial fisherman in Alaska, bush-camp cook and construction roustabout. A decade later, aptitude and IQ tests led to university entrance and he majored in journalism. He was soon speech writer and public relations consultant to cabinet ministers and later, a newspaper and television reporter. In the last and longest phase of a working life he was television commercial producer and director (DGC) for national clients.He now divides his time writing and fly fishing.

Book preview

Prologue

George,

Vancouver

2002

Across the harbor the mountains were clad in patches of gauzy cloud. Out in the bay freighters rested at anchor, black against the flat pewter of calm winter sea. From the bedroom window high up in the penthouse apartment it all looked like a watercolor.

The girl stirred. A groan and a sigh and disheveled dark tresses emerge from the covers. A single hazel eye peeks above the duvet, squinting in the light.

What time is it?

Almost two.

He turns in the chair, watching. Slender white arms emerge in a stretch and a yawn. The covers fall away revealing girlish breasts. Another groan and she swings her legs to the floor and is sitting, the covers trailing to the floor.

God, I feel a mess. She goes to the bathroom, unsteady and rumpled. In a moment he hears the shower running and turns back to stare at the city outside. Traffic and muted taxi horns and tires squishing on wet pavements. Pedestrian ants rush through the intersection a block away.

Her scent was still on him and absently he lifted an arm and sniffed. He was tired without the high of the morning-after. His memory of the night was vague at best. He was already on his third drink of the day. He stared out the window and scratched his crotch and idly wondered how to get her to come back. More than anything, he needed her to wash away the years.

When he looked up she was standing next to him draped in a bath towel, dark wet hair plastered to a small skull. He reached for her and she grinned and opened the towel and closed the ends over his head. Her warmth and scent enveloped him. He rested his face on her flat belly and wrapped his arms about her. He inhaled deeply and sighed. He wanted to go to sleep that way, in her warm sanctuary.

I used your toothbrush. Hope you don’t mind.

He began to laugh, mutely. She pushed him away and snapped him with the wet towel.

You look like shit and smell like a saloon, George. I’m getting dressed.

Where you going?

Home. It’s Christmas, remember? I got a lot a running around to do. I gotta go see this photographer, for my portfolio. I’ve been trying to get my prints back from him for months now. He’s just screwing me around.

Come back tonight. We’ll go for dinner at the Tea House. He kept the Please out of it.

Oh, I forgot, she said as she wiggled into her dress, "at lunch the other day, that producer who’s in charge of post? He was bitching about you to another producer. Something about exposures being off, the ef-stops or something."

You coming back tonight?

No. Can’t.

Tomorrow?

Don’t know. I’ll see you on the set Wednesday anyway. And there’s the wrap party.

Yeah. What about the weekend?

Sure. Ah, shit. Look George, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I need time to straighten out, you know? And I need to find work. I don’t have an Oscar or Gemini or whatever you got up on the shelf there. Producers don’t call me unless they’re dreaming of a quickie. All I do is run to auditions and cattle calls. I don’t know what I’m doing one minute to the next. It’s like everything’s going real fast for me, you know?

That was the longest speech he had ever heard her make. She dressed and they hugged at the door and he went back to his chair, poured himself another two fingers of whiskey. His hand was shaking and he put the glass down. He should shower. He went into the bathroom, then stopped and studied himself in the mirror. His hair was a dirty yellowish-white, long and greasy, pulled back in a ponytail. His cheeks and nose bloomed with fine capillaries. He looked into the bloodshot watery eyes and turned away and went into the front room. Drink in hand, he sat staring out at the traffic and the mist, muted sounds coming up from the wet pavements below.

His career was done. He was done. Too many years of fourteen-hour days on film sets. Sometimes he allowed himself to see as others probably saw him—a functioning drunk with no life, a man defined by his work. Sure, the money was great and the prestige was good. But these were incidental. It was the work itself that he craved. In the end, it was all that mattered. He was still on speaking terms with two former wives but after they both remarried he hardly gave them a thought. His children were somewhere abroad and called regularly whenever they ran short. Friends and family were the ever-changing cast and crew—the two hundred people who happened to work on whatever film or television series he was on. He had painted with light and measured out his life in f-stops. And now he was done. His agent seldom called anymore. There were no feature-film offers now. He was lucky to get low budget TV. It was time to retire and the thought sent shivers down his spine. Work was the pursuit of beauty, and without work and without beauty, there was only drink. And memories he’d sooner forget.

He had tried the meetings but they didn’t take and he had never thought much of the Twelve Steps. He’d usually slink out when they broke for coffee. He had never stood up and said: My name is George Atkins and I’m an alcoholic. Alcoholics were the other people in the room. He had done rehab more than once. It was expensive and it didn’t take. Actually, he didn’t think he had much of a problem. Not really. Sure, he liked his drink but then, he wasn’t like those pathetic drunks you see stumbling around. He was a steady kind of drinker without theatrics, like his father. When he drank it sort of ironed out the kinks and put things in perspective. He could look back then and remember clearly.

Somewhere far below a car backfired and he reflexively flinched and clutched the glass tighter. Then he sighed and relaxed. All these years later and sometime he still had trouble with gunfire on film sets—it all still harked back to ‘Nam. No question,’Nam was the turning point. In the early Seventies, back in the world, he had avoided the debates. He didn’t want to talk politics and didn’t want to discuss Vietnam with people who’d never been there. He didn’t understand the fuss. The Horror. Bullshit. Vietnam was a high, the highest high there was. Two tours in that green country with its jungles, brown rivers and jeweled snakes. And scrawny dwarfs in black pajamas. Life was so cheap and taut and vibrant that it hummed and sparked like high-voltage wires. Two tours. Two tours when he was scared shitless and more alive than he had ever been, before or since.

Before. Jesus. Grey dreary winters in Birch River, a regional shopping and supply hub wedged somewhere between the southern edge of the boreal forest and the Great Lakes. Back then, a town of maybe four or five thousand souls, with the usual collection of churches, school, bank, and a Main Street with its grocer and butcher, hardware and diner. Couple of service stations, the Legion, the undertaker. Edelman’s emporium at the end of the street.

And there they were, the Atkins, on a dirt road three miles out of town in a house that wasn’t much more than a plywood-and-tarpaper shack on what the old man liked to call The Farm, a quarter-section of mostly uncleared birch and alder thickets and gloomy stands of tamarack and spruce. His name was Joe and he was a carpenter and general handyman. In summer he took odd jobs and you could usually see his beat-up Chevy pickup almost anywhere in town—most often parked in front of the Legion beer hall. Sometimes, not that often really, he’d be gone for a couple of days on a bender in some booze camp. When the money ran out he’d be back, sick and morose. But come fall he was off in the woods with gun and hounds. They lived mostly on game and what vegetables Ma grew in her little garden. That and the chickens that ran wild in the yard all summer. In winter he trapped some and drank some and when the trapping was good and fur prices were up he always said that, come summer, he was sure going to finish the house. Then he drank some more—a steady, quiet kind of drinking without melodrama or theatrics. When town people thought of Joe Atkins, if they thought of him at all, it was not as the town’s handyman but as a steady drinker who could sometime be called on for carpentry and odd jobs.

In ‘Nam, what he remembered mostly were the Birch River winters. Winters so cold that the air seemed to snap and crackle. Sounds carried far in that frozen silence. The snow crunched underfoot, each step a statement. Frozen firewood split at the touch of the ax with the sound of a .22 going off. At night, lying in a sagging steel-framed bed in an attic with bare plywood walls insulated with chopped newspapers, staring at the exposed rafters of the roof, he listened to the miserable pack of hounds freezing in their kennel outside, baying at the moon. One winter the wolves were back in the country and he heard them howl far back in the woods, their cries drifting on the wind, and then the dogs fell silent. All he could hear then was the old man’s grunting and the steady rhythm of the squeaking bed below coming up through the floorboards, punctuated by the occasional snap and pop of the wood stove in the kitchen. Nothing more ever came of all that grunting and squeaking and George remained an only child. Sometimes he would sit up with the blankets wrapped tight about thin shoulders and he’d blow and rub on the frozen attic window until he could see outside and often, what he saw on a winter’s night was pure wonder. Moonlight sometimes played crazy magic on the snow-covered little pasture, throwing shadows of blue and deepest purple and, other times, on really cold and clear winter nights, the sky above the brooding black forest was illuminated by aurora borealis and the northern lights put on a light show of greens and yellows, just for him. Years later, these arctic visions were reborn in a series of award-winning Volvo commercials. But long before the commercials, there was Vietnam.

Damn it, at least ‘Nam was warm. The guys bitched about everything—the heat, the bugs and humidity, the warm rain. They were mad—it was wonderful. It was like hunting in a green sauna. Hunting and fishing were about the only common ground with the old man. He was just a little kid first time Joe took him deer hunting. He was bursting with pride and excitement when the old man piled gear and guns and dogs in the back of the pickup and Ma was fussing nervously about him and pulling the wool toque down about his ears and muttering Land’s sake, Joe. Child’s too young for this.

Now Martha, quit fussin’. Boy’ll be fine. It’s time he learns. C’mon boy, hop in.

They started out of the yard, the dogs in the back excited, paws propped up on the edge of the truck box, howling and yapping. They were an odd bunch of hounds—beagles, coonhounds and every combination that bad breeding could produce.

Gotta stop off in town first at the Jew’s store. Pick up some shells and stuff, Joe said. That was Edelman’s, the first and only Jewish family to move into Birch River, postwar refugees from Hitler’s Europe. They set up shop at the end of Main Street in a storefront that had been boarded-up since the Depression. They lived in a small converted apartment above the store. The town already had Campbell’s General Store on Main Street, a sort of mini department store with well-ordered shelves and a decent hardware section. When Edelman’s opened no one knew quite what to make of it and it seems Edelman didn’t either, as the sign simply said: EDELMAN’S—Quality Merchandise at Discount Prices. Edelman bought war surplus and bankrupt stock in the city and shipped it all by truck to Birch River, where all sorts of merchandise would be unloaded once a month and displayed on shelves with great handwritten signs proclaiming SALE!!! and SPECIAL!!! If you never knew what you’d find on the shelves from one month to the next, neither did Edelman. But prices were good and, more important—Edelman extended credit. With credit even guys like Joe Atkins could walk tall.

Joe’s footfalls echoed on the worn floorboards as he first fingered a red mackinaw, then thumbed an ax blade he picked out of a barrel of tools. Finally he made his way to the counter where Edelman greets him with a smiling mouth and hooded eyes.

Goot mornink chentlemen.

At this demonstration of the Queen’s English, Joe at once feels superior. You see it by the way his back straightens ever so slightly and his chin tucks in.

Gimme a box of Thirty-Thirty Winchester. And, yeah—ah, a pound o’ coffee and a can of tobacco and makings.

Edelman turns to the shelves behind the counter to get the coffee and tobacco. Axel, get de cartriches for dis chentleman. Zey are on ze bottom shelf.

Axel moves out from the shadows—George’s age, shorter, with a messy mop of dark hair. He’s in George’s class and has been the butt of every classroom prank since he had arrived. He is still the only outsider in class, an alien. Now he brings a box of cartridges and lays it on the counter where Edelman adds it to the brown paper bag with the other stuff.

Dat’s eight dollars and twelve cents. Pronounced tsents.

Sure. Put it on my tab.

Edelman stares, blinks and sighs, reaches for the loose-leaf binder, leafs quickly then comes back to the first page. George is staring at the blue numbers tattooed on the inside of Edelman’s left forearm.

Atkins, yes? Is already forty-two dollars and eighty-three cents.

Don’t worry about it, Edelman. Say, what’s your Christian name anyway. I can’t keep calling you Edelman.

Excuse me?

Eh, your first name, you know. I’m Joe. What’s yours?

My name is Yakov. Carefully articulated, accented English.

Yakov. Hey, that’d be Jacob. Or Jake. That’s it. We’ll call you Jake. Put her there Jake. Joe extends a big calloused brown hand and in a moment the newly anointed and Anglicized Jake is shaking hands and with small formal bows mumbles, A pleasure, a pleasure, ah, Joe. They walk out, and the last thing George sees is Axel, absolutely still, staring.

Soon they’re rattling down a dirt road through the woods. After many twists and turns the road swings into an old logging trail, now no more than a pair of vague ruts in the autumn woods. The old truck rattles on until George thinks he’d burst with excitement. The North woods are aflame, the birch trunks white slashes against the red and orange and green. The air carries a bite of frost. These are things that he takes in on the periphery, on the edge of his consciousness. He’s on fire with visions of ivory-racked bucks and snarling bears. Miles on, there’s another twist and turn in the trail and they see the smoke curling up through the trees before they see the camp itself. There’s distant barking, and with their hounds baying from the back of the truck they finally arrive at the camp the men had set up.

Camp was a large army-surplus canvass tent, old and much patched, set up beside a clear creek. The men had already cut a good supply of firewood. A pack of hounds came on the run to surround the pickup, and their own dogs bailed out before the truck came to a stop. For a while there was the general melee and noise of men and dogs greeting each other—the men with beer bottles and back slaps, the dogs with low growls, tails stiff and erect, circling and sniffing butts. Soon there was a minor dogfight but then a few kicks and yelps later the dogs sorted themselves out and went back to social sniffing. The men sat around the fire drinking beer and rolling smokes.

George ran to check out the creek. The water was low and the color of old whiskey. Large pale rocks lay exposed, bleached in the sun. The water ran around the boulders and over the clean gravel bottom. He peered into the cold clear water trying to spot the trout he knew must be there but all he could see were red and yellow leaves drifting in the current.

He soon learned that a boy’s job in a man’s hunting camp was to fetch water from the creek, split firewood, feed the dogs and wash dishes. There were three other men in the camp. There was some lawyer who came up from the city a few times to fish and hunt and there was Mr. Champion, the town’s butcher, a man who looked his part exactly. There was also Mr. McFarlane, the town’s pharmacist whose daughter Brenda, George was destined to date years later. They were all good men, solid and calm, quiet drinkers all.

When the supper dishes were done George turned into his bag while the men drank and smoked and played cards, quiet voices in the light of a hissing Coleman lantern. It seemed to him that he couldn’t sleep at all, what with visions of trophy buck dancing in his head, but it was but a minute until someone shook him awake to the smell of frying bacon and strong coffee. Outside, the dogs were restless and whining.

The mercury had dropped overnight. It was still dark out and cold when they started. The sedges and junipers and swamp cedar were powdered in hoarfrost and gleamed a dull white, and the puddles in the trail had frozen in a thin crust so that the ice crunched underfoot whenever you stepped on them in the dark. The men had already taken the hounds to a swamp where they planned to release the pack, and he was left with Joe. He wasn’t allowed the .22 on this hunt. He figured he was supposed to watch and learn, so he walked along in the dark with his hands tucked in his pockets to keep warm. His breath came out in little white puffs. This was the real thing now; he was a boy among men and he wasn’t about to screw up. And so they walked, father and son, along an overgrown logging trail to a spot the father knew. It got a little lighter as they walked and soon they arrived at a little clearing that bordered a low alder swamp. There was a gnarled old maple stump at the edge of the swamp, thick with tangled shoots that grew out of the roots and formed a natural blind. Joe scraped the ground with his feet to clear the noisy dry litter and they edged into the space he had made and got comfortable with their backs against the rough wood of the stump. It was cold. Somewhere close a squirrel began scolding and chattering.

We can still talk a little, if we keep it down, Joe said. George nodded.

When it gets lighter you’ll see the edge of the swamp, just yonder. The swamp’s pretty dry this time of year. When ’em hounds jump deer, you’ll hear ‘em baying a long ways off. The deer will stay way ahead of the dogs. The buck will let the does go first and he’ll make hardly no sound. You gotta stay real quiet-like, understand? The boy swallowed and nodded again.

You were gettin’ pretty good on rabbits last year with that twenty-two. You practice some through the summer?

Yeah. Tin cans and such.

He looks at the boy for a beat, sizing him up. You figure you can handle this Thirty-Thirty? and he holds out the worn Winchester.

George takes the rifle from his father and snaps it to his shoulder, sighting over the buckhorn sights. He had played with the gun every chance he got when Joe wasn’t home, but he had never fired a real rifle before. Of course, the stock was way too long.

Yeah, he says. It fits me real good.

Joe just looks him over and then seems to make up his mind. Hold behind the shoulder and squ-eeze that trigger slowly.

George nods again. For the first time that he can recall he is filled with something like love for his father. It surprises and embarrasses him so that he looks down to the gun in his hands.

They wait. The sky turns from navy to lavender to pale blue. It’s light now. The squirrel forgets about them and stops scolding. A whiskey jack flits from branch to branch overhead and everywhere birds break into song. A shot echoes somewhere off in the swamp, muffled, then another, and the birds fall silent. An eternity passes and then they hear it, the faint baying of hounds drifting on the breeze, somewhere back in the swamp. The boy looks up, and Joe nods. Then they hear it again, off to the side now. Another small eternity passes and then the baying comes in again, louder and closer this time. He’s barely breathing. A branch snaps somewhere in the swamp and he feels his father’s steadying hand on his shoulder. He stares into the bush till his eyes water and yet all he can see is brush. And then a flicker of movement and the ear flickers again and he sees the first doe, nervous, stepping daintily, and then another right behind the first. George slowly pulls the hammer to full-cock. Of its own accord the gun is slowly rising to his shoulder. There’s a loud and rapid hammering in his chest and his whole being is focused on the deer until nothing else exists. He feels the hand on his shoulder squeezing and desperately he looks beyond the does and yet sees nothing. And then a soft snort and off to the side there’s the buck, big-bodied and swollen-necked, stepping nervously, testing the wind, stopping half-screened by a low willow. Then he moves again, tail erect and flashing white, stamping a forefoot into the mulch, nostrils flaring and head turning to test the wind, alert and coiled.

Eyes watering and hands shaking, the gunsights wavering all over the deer, something hammering in his chest and a loud surf crashing in his ears and then, somehow, his finger squeezes just as the rifle swings past that spot low behind the shoulder. In the next instant of earsplitting blast that he doesn’t really hear, his nose explodes in pain as the gun recoils and through it all he sees the buck leap in a tremendous jump that takes him sailing straight up and clear over the low brush to disappear back into the swamp. There’s brush breaking and crashing and then all is silent except for the ringing in his ears and Joe slapping his back and saying, Well done, boy. Heart shot. Let’s go git’im.

And then he’s sick—retching and crying, tears and snot and breakfast running mingled with the blood from his nose where he had hit it with his thumb when the rifle recoiled.

They found the buck not thirty yards away just as the hounds came pouring out of the swamp, panting and tongues lolling. Joe shooed them off and the boy knelt by his deer. The animal was beautiful. He was big-bodied, with a rack of unusually thick antlers and points polished to old ivory. He was solid and smooth and perfect, and he smelled of warm hay and woods and something pungent and musky that was all his own. It was full light now, and warm. A last-of-the-year dragonfly was buzzing and snapping in the air, dark and heavy. George was filled with a sadness then that he could not define—for the buck, for the finality of it, and for something else that he was too young then to understand. Joe must have sensed his mood because he stopped all the inane hunter’s congratulations and knelt there beside him, with the deer laid out in front of them and the tired dogs panting all around.

It’s your first deer, and you done good. George kept looking at the deer, miserable.

Look son, an animal lives and then it dies so that something else can live. It’s the way of the world and you may as well learn it now.

Like most serious drinkers Joe could be something of a philosopher. He looked at his father then, and they were two men sharing something that had its beginnings before there was time. The boy had killed and in his father’s world he would never be a child again.

George looked up. It was already dark out and lights were on everywhere. Traffic was heavy and the wet pavement pulsated with reflections of neon and car lights. For a second he thought he saw, as through a red mist, the muzzle flashes of M-16s on full auto and heard the whump-whump of Huey blades, but it was only traffic, horns and taillights and tires hissing on the wet streets below. He thought of Molly then, the shock of seeing her again last week, what the passage of thirty years can do to a woman. Molly said that Axel was living in the Caribbean now, a big financial tycoon. Axel? Go figure.

He knew that if he kept drinking he could black out again and come out the other end sick and shaking for days. He gulped down the last of his drink. He considered the shower again but then poured another two fingers of amber scotch. Screw it. It was Christmas anyway. He stayed where he was, drinking and watching the traffic below.

Part One

Chapter 1

Axel,

British Virgin Islands

2002

It was hot. Axel took out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his neck as he walked. Overhead, the rusting tin roof pinged in the heat. He went past the vendors and their stands of sweets and trinkets and out of the ramshackle airport terminal into the blast furnace of the midday sun. He didn’t look back to the tarmac to see the American Eagle turboprop take off for San Juan, Puerto Rico, where his guests would catch connecting flights. There had been a lot of hearty backslapping and sweaty handshakes with the departing stock promoters. Unawares, he now wiped his hands on his shorts as he walked back to the car.

He was a sinewy man of average height, with that pared-down stringiness that some men acquire late in life, as though everything superfluous had worn off or was discarded long ago. His hair was unruly, thick and startling white against the deeply tanned, lived-in face. Deep-set dark eyes under thick brows squinted in the blinding sun; they were watchful eyes that missed little. Altogether, he looked a man no longer given to illusions. He fished his shirt pocket for the sunglasses as he walked the tarmac. The asphalt was hot and melting-soft underfoot.

The silver BMW still held a cool residue as he started it and set the air-conditioning to high. He drove slowly over the narrow white bridge that connects Beef Island airport to Tortola, past the chandleries and charter marinas in Road Town and onto the narrow winding road that would take him over the spine of the mountains and back home to Garden Bay. He drove fast now, climbing through familiar twists and turns, braking and dodging to avoid stray goats and chickens and the odd donkey that stood in the road. Here and there small, brightly-colored native homes came out of the lush green of banana and banyan